I got divorced.
Those three words always drop like stones into a conversation, heavy in a roiling cauldron of emotions. Strange now, how it seems a little harder for the other person to hear the evidence of my marital failure than it is for me, but that wasn’t always the case. Acceptance was a process.
It wasn’t as if I woke up one morning and said, “When I’m thirty, I hope I’m divorced and all alone. I hope I have no one to sit with on the sofa or laugh with at stupid jokes or argue about whether the toilet seat stays up or down”. Yet here I am, thirty-two and divorced. It happens every day. It’s nothing newsworthy…except to those who are going through it at the moment. Then it becomes all-consuming: a very public “dirty, little secret”. This is particularly true in the south, and any woman who leaves her husband in the Bible belt without just cause, like adultery or physical abuse or the fact that he cheers for the wrong football team, is slapped with the label “Jezebel”. Ok, so I’m joking about the football teams….a little. We all know that Friday night lights and Sunday morning services rival one another down here. At any rate, it would almost be more acceptable to say, “I just could not stand to hear him yell ‘Go Big Orange’ one more time” than for a woman to admit that her marriage is slowly choking her.
I realized pretty early that divorce is often like an amputation to remove a cancer. It leaves this huge, gaping hole that nothing except time can heal. In the meanwhile, you have to adjust to a new life without that limb. The ex isn’t the only part cut away, either. Pretty soon, friends whom you thought were really your friends fall away, too. They stop calling; they stop dropping by; they act as though they don’t know you. You lose the places where you used to go together. You lose the little pieces of life that made the marriage mean something. Just like an amputee suffers from a phantom limb syndrome where he can still feel his missing leg, so I had my moments where I mourned the loss of things I see now I never truly had in the first place.
It is a sad thing, indeed, to look back on fifteen years worth of life and wonder how much was done with an ulterior motive. Was he always so conniving and narcissistic? Was I always so untrusting and jaded? Did life and time change us, or were we always so broken together? I wonder now how much I chose not to see, out of fear and insecurity. More than I’d like to admit, I’m sure -- even to myself.
And, yet, would I change it? It was, in part, these moments that made me who and what I am now, a woman finally comfortable in her own skin. I find myself, though, uttering those proverbial words pretty often, “If it weren’t for my kids…”. I’d what? Hit that cosmic do-over button we all wish we had? Erase him from my life like one big multiple choice mistake? Who knows. We can never really know what we’d do differently, if given the chance. In all honesty, we’d probably make the same crappy choices or, God forbid, make brand-new horrible choices. Sometimes it’s enough to leave well enough alone and know when to get out of Dodge. Then just look ahead.
I was a small-town anomaly-the personification of every drawling debutante’s worst nightmares. I got pregnant my senior year in high school. It was a shock to everyone, but no more so than to myself. Of course I understood the anatomy and biology of it. We’d had that reproductive talk in 8th grade health class, after all. Still, perhaps I thought in the back of my mind that National Honors Society laid claim to some heretofore unknown contraceptive powers. In short, I was an idiot. While I was busy being the editor of the paper and singing in choir, practicing for Mock Trial and Model UN, going to Quiz Bowl games and AP classes, I also managed to make a baby with someone who couldn’t be more wrong for me. Score: hormones 1, common sense 0.
To make matters worse, I refused to follow southern protocol. When I was supposed to marry quickly and produce a lovely infant after a conveniently premature delivery, I instead proceeded to live with my high school sweetheart for eight years. There were many times throughout that near-decade I realized we should never have been together. We were like explosive substances. We brought out the worst in one another. So how did we fix this? We got married. Of course!
For years, we rubbed and scraped through our lives together, quietly ripping one another to shreds. It wasn’t until I woke up one morning and realized I was unrecognizable to myself that I knew something had to change. I couldn’t eat, couldn’t sleep, had no immune system, suffered constant fatigue. I couldn’t even make a simple decision anymore without second-guessing myself. It was brought home to me that I wasn’t hiding it all so well anymore when my mother told me one morning over coffee, “You used to be so independent and so happy. I look at you and feel like I don’t know you anymore. You never laugh. You never smile. You never decide.” In that moment, I knew what I was feeling was real. Other people, if they looked closely enough – if they cared enough, they saw it, too.
And so we divorced. And I was a traitor and somehow suddenly one of the Untouchables. People didn’t make eye contact. They disappeared out of my life like ghosts. It took me a long time to understand if they couldn’t see what was right in front of their faces, if they chose to be blind to the truth of my suffering, they were not people I needed in my life. And so I let them go.
I went out one evening for my 4 mile walk in a new pair of shoes. I hadn’t made it 2 miles when I knew I needed to turn around and head home. What had begun as a mild irritation was quickly becoming a painful, burning blister on my heel. As I headed for home, I knew I needed to pull off my shoes if I ever wanted to make it back. So, here I was, walking along the busiest street in town, barefoot and carrying my shoes like some sort of crazy woman. People stared. They gawked. They wondered if the facility knew I was loose.
It was in the midst of this ridiculousness, I had an epiphany that changed my mind set in a way I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to fully explain. Just as I’d rather walk home barefoot, under the judging eyes of strangers, so I chose to be divorced. I could have stayed in my marriage, rubbed raw and open by the constant abrasions of never being enough, never being what someone else thought I should’ve been, or I could suffer these small snubs and slights to get somewhere I needed to be. Somehow, taking my shoes off was symbolic to me in a way so powerfully, I don’t know if anyone else will ever understand how clear my situation became.
Yes, I am divorced, down here in the Bible belt, of my own volition. I wasn’t left; I wasn’t abandoned; I wasn’t cast aside. I was dying. I was being blistered from the inside out, and I chose to take off those shoes that had never fit right. As I sat next to my ex-husband tonight at a high school football game, cheering on our kiddo from the stands, I thought to myself, “I just couldn’t stand to hear him yell ‘Go, Tech’ one more time…”, and I smiled. I may still be walking barefoot, but I’m getting there.
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